DIRECTV VS. COMCAST

WHAT’S THAT SMELL?

Old Spice is once again
tearing up the viral video
charts, but is the duel
between Fabio and Isaiah
Mustafa moving product
off the shelves?

AdAge.com/digital ➜

SHOWS ABOUT PAWNSHOPS

with what works: stealing their competitors’shows

audience.

But getting bigger and getting
younger is tough. Just ask CBS. With
an average viewer age of 56, CBS has
known its audience for decades and
has a very good sense of what works
and what won’t. MTV, on the other
hand, has been very successful at getting big and staying young, but that
means a lot of guesswork—and also
knowing what worked today probably
won’t on the next generation of 20-
somethings.

The easiest, cheapest way to accomplish this is to just grab what worked
for someone else. A&E, for example, is
10 years older than it was when it was
airing syndicated scripted dramas.
“Pawn Stars” is routinely the top show
on cable and often beats broadcast
competition. The pie of ad dollars isn’t
growing, and now that 91% of the
country subscribes to pay TV, the pie of
viewers isn’t growing much, either,
meaning the easiest way to get another network’s viewers is to bogart its
format.

“They will do anything thatexpands the brand and brings in view-ers. But they are fighting amongstthemselves for the same viewers,” saidBrad Adgate, VP-research at HorizonMedia.

NOKIA, W&K SPLIT

Nokia and its global
agency of record Wieden &
Kennedy, London, are
going their separate ways.
The marketer will no
longer use the AOR model.

AdAge.com/agencynews➜

PROMOTED TWEET FAIL

What happens when a
marketer’s $120,000
promoted tweet ends up
running next to trending
topics like Hitler or songs
about rape?

Sampling alternativecould give rise to newcategories, reduced fraud

■ BY JACK NEFF jneff@adage.com

The pace at
which new
programs
and
concepts
are copied
and
devoured
has clearly
sped up, and
it’s no secret
why:
advertising.

YOUNG AMERICA, the Minnesota pro-motion-services company that has long
been the locus for countless rebate-form
submissions—among other things—is
joining with Citi Prepaid Services to create a new wrinkle in product sampling:
prepaid cards redeemable for full-size
product samples at stores.

The idea is to open up sampling
alternatives for product categories such
as frozen foods, over-the-counter drugs
and laundry detergent, where it’s either
impossible or impractical to send samples
through the mail or
insert them into
newspapers, said
Mark Lockwood, senior VP-payment services for Young
America.

The prepaid cards
are programmed to
be redeemable only
for specific SKUs and
only up to the price of
the item, Mr. Lockwood said. One
advantage of using cards over using
paper coupons for the same purpose is
reducing the risk of redemption fraud,
since such high-value coupons present a
more tempting target than typical cents
or dollar-off coupons. The novelty of
getting a prepaid card vs. a coupon
should also help the offer stand out, he
said.

Other advantages include not having to pay to ship full items to homes,
not having to manufacture a special
sample size and the potential for tying
sampling programs to shopper-market-ing programs that can induce retailers to
stock and prominently display the featured products, he said.

“People are creatures of habit,” Mr.
Lockwood said, so it also can pay to have
them find the product on the store shelf
so they’ll know where to look next time,
as opposed to just having a sample show
up in the mail.

While couponing has been on the
upswing in recent years, packaged-

The prepaid
cards are set
uponly for
specific
SKUs and
only up to
the price of
the item.

SELF-REGULATION
OR SELF-DELUSION?

Bob Garfield writes: “Internet
publishers, advertisers and
agencies will face the wrath of the
United States Senate. Broken
industry promises about
safeguarding consumer privacy
online will yield demands for
legislative and regulatory
remedies, putting at grave risk the
fragile business models
undergirding the digital economy.
And no wonder. The industry has
demonstrated yet again that it
cannot be trusted.”